The Bridge at Andau by James A. Michener

Author:James A. Michener [Michener, James A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780804151481
Publisher: Random House LLC
Published: 2014-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

A stranger to Hungarian history is tempted to say of the AVO terror that it was the worst in the experience of this long-troubled nation. But in certain respects that statement would not be true, for Hungary has known six major terrors, and the communist one is merely the last in an ugly line.

Between the two epoch-making battles of Mohacs, the first (in 1526) a notable Turkish victory over Hungarians and the second (in 1687) a triumph of Hungarians over Turks, Budapest and its surrounding countryside lay under Turkish domination. At intervals, this Ottoman terror was brutal, but when the dominance of Muslim rule was finally accepted by the Hungarians, the Turkish dictatorship relaxed into a kind of heavy-handed, corrupt occupation. In both extent and stupidity, this Turkish terror was a dreadful experience and a deterrent to Hungarian progress.

In 1919, in the midst of the chaos that accompanied the end of World War I, Hungary experienced a native-bom terror about which confusion and debate continue to this day. In that year, Admiral Horthy, of the old Austro-Hungarian fleet, became regent of Hungary and instituted a reactionary dictatorship that lasted until 1944. Life in Hungary during this period was not exactly pleasant, but it probably never reached the levels of debasement screamed about by communist agitators, who refer in almost every speech to the “Horthy fascist terror.” Nevertheless, Horthy must be blamed in part for Hungary’s quick surrender to communism. Invoking his memory, the communists had easy entry into Budapest.

In 1944 Hungary entered into a one-year Nazi terror, which can be precisely defined. If one was an average, well-behaved citizen, the Nazi occupation was not too bad. Everyone testifies to that. It was disagreeable, and Hungarians came both to despise and to ridicule the Germans, but life was not intolerable. But if one was Jewish, the Nazi terror was hideous beyond description, and the worst accomplished by the AVO fell short of what the Nazis did. It was this German terror that was automatically extended by the homegrown regime of Ferenc Szalasi for a brief period in 1944.

In addition to those three terrors which extended over the entire nation, there were two others of sometimes awful character that touched only parts of the country. In Transylvania, to the east, mixed populations consisting of Hungarians and Rumanians have frequently in history been shifted back and forth between those two nations. When Rumania controlled Transylvania, Hungarians living there had a miserable life, and when the converse was true, Hungarians proved that they could be just as beastly overlords as the Rumanians had been the year before.

The same situation prevailed along the southern border, although this time it was Hungarians and Serbs who bedeviled each other, and if the worst incidents of both the Transylvanian and the Serbian troubles are collected, they surpass in horror the AVO terror.

Therefore one would not be well advised to use careless superlatives in describing the AVO terror. It has had its precedents in Hungary.

But the peculiar horror of the AVO terror and the characteristic which sets it apart as particularly loathsome is this.

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